A Romantic Icon on Opium—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

                        Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his early success.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on October 21, 1772 at Ottery St Mary, Devon, England.  He was the youngest of the fourteen children of an impoverished vicar who died in the boy’s ninth year.  His early brilliance was recognized and he was accepted as a charity student at the School of Christ’s Hospital.  He was able to attend Jesus College, Cambridge with the support of an elder brother.  Despite his success as student including winning a medal for a long poem in Greek, he surrendered to the temptations of campus life—then as now alcohol, drugs (opium,) and sex.  Opium addiction would be his lifelong bane. 

Coleridge left school and enlisted in the Dragoons under an assumed name after a messy affair with the sister of a friend.  An indifferent soldier, he frequently fell off his horse.  The Army was not disappointed when a brother showed up and paid for his release.  

William Wadsworth, Coleridge's friend, mentor, and co-author of Lyrical Ballads                                   

After another abortive attempt at school, he schemed to form a utopian plantation in Pennsylvania.  The articles of covenant of Pantisocracy required members to be married, so Coleridge rushed into an unhappy marriage.  Plans for the plantation, of course, collapsed and Coleridge turned more heavily to opium. 

He was, however, serious about religion and literature.  He managed to become ordained as a Unitarian minister and made his living serving small chapels while he began to write seriously.  He became a close friend of William Wordsworth.  The two poets together published Lyrical Ballads, which included Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.  His reputation as a poet was immediately made.  The fame from the poem led to a £150 yearly annuity from the wealthy Unitarian Wedgewood family, the famous manufacturers of fine china and porcelain.  He was able to give up the ministry and concentrate on his poetry.  

Coleridge's vision of Xanadu in his Kubla Khan is often thought to have been inspired by opium revels.  Illustration of the poem by Dugald Walker.

Despite success, he slid into greater opium dependency and fought dark depressions.  Kubla Kahn was written in 1797 and published in Christabel, Kubla Khan, and the Pains of Sleep in 1816 and is regarded by most scholars as the product of an opium vision. 

Coleridge accompanied Wordsworth on a European tour in 1799.  The two separated in Germany where Coleridge immersed in German philosophy, especially Immanuel Kant’s transcendental idealism.  On his return to England he published translations of Friedrich Schiller. He moved to the Lake District to be close to Wordsworth but his marriage was tension filled, his opium use increased, and he began quarreling with his friend. 

In 1802 Coleridge fell helplessly in love with Wordsworth’s sister in law Sara Hutchinson and composed his ballad Love for her.

Somehow Coleridge obtained a minor diplomatic position on Malta during an 1804 trip to that island and Sicily.  Despite perfuming his duties satisfactorily his health began to fail and he increased his daily consumption of laudanum.  When he returned to England in 1806 his deterioration shocked his friends.  After a short stay, he returned to Italy until 1808.

Unitarian industrialist and philanthropist Josiah Wedgewood II and his brothers sustained Coleridge with a comfortable annuity of 150 Pounds but reduced it in alarm as the poet sank deeper into addiction.

Now using up to two quarts of laudanum a week, Coleridge separated from his wife, alienated his friends, and finally breached his relationship with Wordsworth. The Wedgewood’s reduced his annuity in alarm at his deteriorating condition.

In 1809 he established his own periodical The Friend in which he indulged his wide interests.  It lasted through twenty-five seldom read issues before failing.  Years later essays from the magazine published in book form finally found an audience and influenced philosophers John Stuart Mill and Ralph Waldo Emerson among others.

In a crisis of faith, Coleridge foreswore the Unitarian Church and returned to the Anglicanism of his father, sometimes rising to the defense of orthodoxy from attacks by his former comrades. 

                            Coloridge at 42 by Washington Allston.

Finally, in 1817 his long slide to oblivion was ended when he moved in with the family of his London physician, Dr. James Gillman, who kept his demons largely in check for his remaining 18 years.  While in residence at the Gillman home, he managed to write his major prose work, the Biographia Literaria, biographical essays and philosophical musings.  He also published new poetry including Sibylline Leaves in 1820, Aids to Reflection in 1825, and Church and State in 1826. During his final years he was regarded as a great talker in the tradition of Samuel Johnson and his weekly Thursday Salons became famous.  He died in London on July 25, 1834.

Adapted from the biographical notes for Four Hundred Years of Unitarian and Universalist Poets: From John Milton to Sylvia Plath, a readers theater presentation by Patrick Murfin.

Frost at Midnight

The Frost performs its secret ministry,

Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry

Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.

The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,

Have left me to that solitude, which suits

Abstruser musings: save that at my side

My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.

‘Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs

And vexes meditation with its strange

And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,

This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,

With all the numberless goings-on of life,

Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame

Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;

Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,

 

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.

Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature

Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,

Making it a companionable form,

Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit

By its own moods interprets, every where

Echo or mirror seeking of itself,

And makes a toy of Thought.

 

                      But O! how oft,

How oft, at school, with most believing mind,

Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,

To watch that fluttering stranger ! and as oft

With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt

Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,

Whose bells, the poor man’s only music, rang

From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,

So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me

With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear

Most like articulate sounds of things to come!

So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,

Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!

And so I brooded all the following morn,

Awed by the stern preceptor’s face, mine eye

Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:

Save if the door half opened, and I snatched

A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,

For still I hoped to see the stranger’s face,

Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,

My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!

 

         Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,

Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,

Fill up the intersperséd vacancies

And momentary pauses of the thought!

My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart

With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,

And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,

And in far other scenes! For I was reared

In the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim,

And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze

By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags

Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,

Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores

And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear

The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible

Of that eternal language, which thy God

Utters, who from eternity doth teach

Himself in all, and all things in himself.

Great universal Teacher! he shall mould

Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

 

         Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

Whether the summer clothe the general earth

With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing

Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch

Of mossy apple-tree, while the night-thatch

Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall

Heard only in the trances of the blast,

Or if the secret ministry of frost

Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

 

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 

Why Was Henry Bergh the Man Who Was too Kind?

 

                              Fashionable and foppish young Henry Bergh returning from Europe.

Henry Bergh was a softy.  A sentimental fool who could not abide to witness the sufferings of animals and small, helpless creatures.  And that made him a damned annoyance, and worse, a meddlesome nuisance to honest men who were simply trying to get the most out of livestock that God had clearly given them dominion over.  It said so right in the Bible, didn’t it?  To make matters worse he was richer than Croesus and had money to burn and spread around courts and newspapers to persecute men for doing as they saw fit with their own damned property!  And he was slavishly followed by legions of swooning ladies and lily-livered do-gooders abetting his outrages.

Or so a good slice of public opinion would have it.  Just who was the fancy gentleman in a fashionable high hat, and elegant clothes running about the streets wresting whips from the hands of masters?

A contemporary cartoon mocking Bergh for his bleeding heart.

Henry Bergh was born in New York City on August 29, 1813 with a literal silver spoon in his mouth.  His father, Christian Bergh was a ship builder who laid the keels of several ships for the U.S. Navy as well as many a merchant vessel.  Like many sons of self-made men, he seemed a bit spoiled and unmotivated to seek a career.   He was enrolled at Columbia but was an indifferent student and failed to graduate.

Instead of taking a degree the young man left for the Grand Tour of Europe in 1831. He liked what he saw there and lingered.  Bergh tried his hand as a man of letters and penned unproduced plays, sentimental melodramas with pointed moral lessons.

In 1836 his father announced his intention to retire and wrote his wayward son that it was time to stop playing and come home to manage the family firm with his older brother Christian, Jr.  However reluctantly—probably facing the cutoff of support if he did not comply—Bergh came home.

Back in New York the same year he wooed and wed a lovely society belle with her own fortune, Catherine Matilda Taylor.

However a reluctant tycoon, Bergh proved to be a capable administrator.  The firm thrived and expanded especially as he helped transition to the age of steam power.  His active career in business was not a long one.  His father died in 1843 and he felt under no more obligation to continue his business.  He sold out his portion of the firm which brought him a large sum of cash.  He invested wisely for the long term rather than play dangerous games on the market and was able to retire to a comfortable life of leisure on a dependable income at the age of only 32.

He and Catherine returned to Europe where they traveled and took up residence.  He resumed his aborted career as a playwright.

Bergh’s story might have ended there with him idling away his years as a comfortable expatriate had fate not intervened.  The Confederacy was stepping up diplomatic activity in Europe.  One of their primary targets was Imperial Russia, a society whose dependence on virtually enslaved serfs drew the same moral condemnation in the West as Southern Black chattel slavery.  It was also an emerging power with ambition to challenge Britain’s supremacy in international trade, including cotton.  Confederate agents had high hopes of gaining Russian recognition of their independence and even possible intervention in the war.

Secretary of State William Seward, a pre-war political powerhouse in New York State was familiar with the Bergh family, who were loyal Republicans and Unionists.  Bergh was already in Europe and would not be delayed in a mission to St. Petersburg by an ocean voyage.  President Abraham Lincoln appointed him as Secretary to the American Legation to the Court of Tsar Alexander II and Acting Vice Consul in 1863.

In less than two years of service as a diplomat, Bergh learned two things—that he hated the miserable cold of a Russian winter, and that the Russians treated their animals with abominable cruelty.  On the streets of St. Petersburg he could observe almost every day animals being savagely beaten, starving horses worked until they dropped dead in their traces, and worse. 

After resigning in post in 1865, Bergh stopped in London on the way home to America to consult with the Earl of Harrowby, President of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals which had become famous for its defense of draft and coach horses in London.

New York Unitarian minister Rev. Henry Whitney Bellows lent Bergh his considerable organizational skills to create the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA).

Bergh, with the support of his wife, determined to do something similar at home.  In late 1866 he began lecturing widely and circulating tracts against animal cruelty.  Then he found an important ally, his minister the Rev.  Henry Whitney Bellows of the First Congregational Church of New York City, the city’s leading Unitarian clergyman and one of the most influential Protestant ministers and reformers in the city.  Bellows was also something of an organizational genius.  During the war he founded and organized the United States Sanitary Commission, America’s first great nationwide charity which raised money and collected medical supplies for the Army, organized distribution, established hospitals, and trained and supervised most of the nurses on the Union side.  It was a massive job that required the creation and coordination of local units in towns and cities across the Union as well as close logistical cooperation with the huge armies in the field.  After the war Bellows re-invigorated Unitarianism with the formation of the National Conference of Unitarian Churches.

Bellows help introduce Bergh to a network of influential reformers and help him develop a strategy of getting an animal protection law passed in New York State that could be a model of the nation.  A little later, at Catherine Bergh’s suggestion, Bellows helped recruit women reformers, many of the veterans of the abolitionist movement, the Sanitary Commission, temperance and other reform movements.  Energetic women were soon the shock troops of a growing movement.

A public lecture at New York’s Clinton Hall in early 1866 was the beginning of a push for legislation in the state.  He was victorious in an astonishingly short period of time—probably faster than any reform movement ever attained its first legislative goals.  In early April the state legislature passed bills drafted by Bergh that prohibited cruelty to animals and granted a charter to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA).  Four days later on April 11, 1866 the Society was formally organized in New York City with Bergh as its President—a job he would keep the rest of his life.

Bergh with his ASPC badge.  Deputized to enforce new New York State anti-cruelty laws he often personally intervened in abuse cases and made arrests.

Bergh was more than just an administrator and advocate.  Under the terms of the state law, he and other ASPCA officers were deputized to enforce the anti-cruelty laws on the street.  Among his first targets were the widespread abuse of horses and draft animals; dangerous but popular public entertainments like bull and bear baiting and dog and cock fighting; and the starvation of many domestic animals.  Bergh would personally arrest offenders on the street and haul them before police magistrates.  The press ate up these colorful confrontations and Bergh popularity grew in some quarters as did attacks on him from outraged masters and animal owners who dubbed him the Great Meddler.

The ASPCA was at first funded out of the personal purse of the Berghs.  But it soon attracted additional support including a huge $150,000 bequest from Frenchman Louis Bonard in 1871 which enabled the organization to move into more spacious quarters at the corner of 4th Avenue and 22nd Street.  In the city the ASPCA was able to fund heavy duty animal ambulances and even a crane to rescue horses who fell into open excavations with surprising regularity.

The original ASPCA seal.

When Bergh turned his attention to the treatment of animals in circuses and menageries he clashed with P.T. Barnum, but Barnum, a noted humanitarian and Universalist lay leader was won over to the cause.  He conformed treatment of animals in his circuses and other holdings to the standards of the ASPCA and campaigned with Bergh to get other exhibitors to follow suit.

Bergh was appalled to learn that tens of thousands of pigeons were slaughtered each year in sport shooting competitions.  Bergh personally invented one of the first devices to launch faux pigeons as substitute targets, eventually leading the modern sports of trap and skeet shooting and the abandonment of live targets.

He continued to travel and speak widely, the influence of his ideas and organization growing steadily.  One important 1873 speech was given to the Evangelical Alliance and Episcopal Convention which led directly to a new Episcopal cannon requiring the church’s priests to preach annually on animal cruelty.

New societies spread across the country, many of the spearheaded by the women reformers Bergh had gone out of his way to cultivate. One by one other state adopted laws modeled on those Bergh wrote for New York.  By 1886 36 states had adopted anti-cruelty laws.  With the help of ASPCA legal counsel Elbridge Gerry, Bergh got the Federal Government to ban cruelty to animals used for interstate transportation.

Little Mary Ellen Wilson showing wounds from being whipped by her foster mother was rescued by Bergh.  No laws prohibited physically discipling children in any way so the ASPCA argued in court that since humans are animals she was entitled to protection of anti-cruelty laws.

But Bergh’s work was not confined to animals.  In 1874 Methodist mission worker, Etta Angell Wheeler brought the sad case of Mary Ellen Wilson an 11 year old girl abused by her foster mother, Mary McCormack who daily whipped her with rawhide, used her as a domestic slave, starved her, and kept her locked in a closet.  Together Wilson and Burgh rescued the child and the ASPCA brought charges against Mary McCormack.  At the time children were considered the chattel of their parents or guardians with no rights of their own and no protections from assault or abuse.  Elbridge Gerry cleverly argued that at very least the child was an animal an entitled to protection under those anti-cruelty laws.  Mrs. McCormack was convicted and sentenced to a year in jail.  Etta eventually became a ward of Mary Wilson and lived happily and safely.

The incident spurred a new round of New York legislation and the charter of a new organization, New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children also headed by Burgh.  Similar societies spread to other states starting with Massachusetts.

Bergh continued meddling until he died on March 12, 1888 and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn.